STRICKLAND GILLILAN ME AND THE PRESIDENT Strickland Gillilan of Baltimore is a well-known journalist, lecturer, and writer of humorous verses and stories, and the author of the famous line, "Off agin, on agin, gone agin, Finnigin." This speech was delivered at a banquet to President William Howard Taft, by the Knights of Columbus of Peoria, Ill., at the Coliseum in that city. The speech was delivered the evening of the day in which President Taft had received the news, en route, that Canada had by popular vote rejected the American reciprocity tariff proposition. MR. TOASTMASTER AND DISTINGUISHED GUESTS:-I am glad to be here and look into your faces. There are faces here that ought to be looked into now and then. Somehow or other, as I look at this subject of mine, in print, it doesn't seem so smart as it seemed when I first thought of it. I can't help thinking, as I look at it, of something a student friend of mine once said -one of those fellows who talk entirely by ear-that "Homer wrote the Idiot and the Oddity." For fear some persons present might not have understood the toastmaster when he introduced me, I wish it known that the gentleman to my right, whose displacement exceeds my own in every way there is, is the latter end of my subject. This is a proud night for him. He has never, in all his life, been permitted to spend an evening with me, till now. In fact, I have never met the gentleman before. I had arranged for it several times, but he managed to sidestep it. I doubt right now whether he appreciates the honor. We live so close together when we are both home, which is very seldom, that I can hear, on a still day, the reactionary Wisconsin cow lowing in the standpat White House stall; but we have never previously met. In fact, I have been almost as far from the President as I have been from the presidency-and heaven only knows how far that is. Sometimes I have grown so utterly worn-out with the monotony of being constantly right that I have thought I'd like to be President for a while, just for relief. And I guess I can prove by you-can't I, President Taft?-that as a form of relief the presidency is a false alarm and [turning to the audience] mighty temporary. It was a disgruntled office-seeker speaking bitterly after the returns and himself were all in, who said he "would rather be right than be President"; but he never got away with it. He never convinced anybody. Most of us have had to be contented to go through life without being either right or President. But the gentleman on my right had his choice, and look what he picked out! However, after being with the genial gentleman this evening for as long as a belated train would let me, my opinion of the President, like the tariff bill he signed, has been revised upward. I want to congratulate this committee on its excellent selection of speakers. Who can imagine a wider variety than a President of the United States, a Congressman, an archbishop and me! This list includes every known form of piety and iniquity. I refuse to classify them. Do it yourselves. Also, laying aside persiflage, I want to speak a word to you and to all other American people as to the lack of human sympathy and moral support given to our Presidents. None of us realizes (and few of us even attempt to realize) the enormous burdens laid daily upon the shoulders of our chief executive. Not a day passes but that something of transcendent importance is given him for decision. We do not help him. But when he manages, because he is human, to make any sort of error, we criticize him freely-freely is the right word; if it cost us a cent we wouldn't do it! We criticize him out of the top of our minds where the scum of ignorance stands, green and bubbly. Kipling said: The toad beneath the harrow knows The butterfly upon the road We are all toads and butterflies in this world. And what the useful, perennial burden-bearing toad needs from the lightminded short-lived butterflies is not so much flippant advice as genuine sympathy; words of encouragement when we can give them, and kindly silence when we can't. I thank you. INTRODUCING MRS. ASQUITH Address delivered in presenting Mrs. Margot Asquith to a Kansas City audience, in March 1922. FRIENDS: This is a very palpitant moment for us celebrities in front of you. We may seem cool and composed, but underneath a placid exterior both of us are fairly seething with agitation. This is positively the first time we two have ever appeared together in public! I am probably the only genuinely great personage this lady has not previously met and been familiar with. You who have perused her amazingly frank memoirs may have been startled to note how conspicuously, how glaringly, how prominently I was omitted from that volume. However, I may be in the next one if I don't behave. Up to this time Mrs. Asquith has been able to achieve and to maintain that lofty Kipling ideal of walking "with kings" without losing "the common touch"; but after to-night-well, folks, I don't know. I have my doubts. Being seen in public with me, this way, with me treating her in every way as an equal-it may go right straight to her head. It is barely possible that after this there will be no living with her. Personally, I expect from now on to sling a mean snub. Honor after honor has come to this distinguished woman. The society of the great has been her steady diet. Ossa has been piled upon Pelion, as it were, to do her honor. But tonight is the peak; the crest; the climax; the summum bonum; the ne plus ultra; the nux vomica; to say nothing of the pax vobiscum! Greater honor can come to no one than to be introduced to a company of Kansas citizens-by me! WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE THE AGE OF RESEARCH Speech of William E. Gladstone at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, May 5, 1877. Sir Francis Grant, the president of the Academy, being indisposed, Sir Gilbert Scott, the eminent architect, took the chair at the special request of the president. In introducing Mr. Gladstone, he said: "The next toast is, "The Interests of Literature.' I have been somewhat perplexed myself to think why the custom of the Academy places science before literature. I see, however, that it is quite right, for literature is a member of our own family-our sister. [Cheers.] I am old enough to recollect that when Sir Morton Archer Shee, who united art with poetry, was elected president of the Academy, this epigram appeared in the Times: 'So Painting crowns her sister Poesie, The world is all astonished, so is She(e).' Many present will remember in more recent times how Charles Dickens, when returning thanks for his toast, expressed the same sentiment of relationship by altering some words of Rob Roy's and saying that when at our Academy he felt so much at home, as to be inclined to exclaim: 'My foot is on my native heath, although my name is not Macgregor.' Next to religion, literature in very many of its phases supplies the noblest subjects for art. History, biography, and works of fiction all contribute their share; while poetry enjoys the cumulative privilege of uniting in itself the incentives to art which are commanded by all other branches of literature as well as the ennobling sentiment inspired by religion, patriotism and other affections of the human heart. An elevating mission, indeed, be it only directed in a worthy course. Frivolity and license are alike the bane of literature and art. Earnestness of purpose and severity of moral tone are the stamina of both. Shorn of these, both alike find their strength is gone from them. It is consoling to reflect that notwithstanding the laborious turmoil of politics we have had three, and I think successive, Prime Ministers who have made literature the solace of their scanty leisure and delighted the world by their writings on subjects extraneous to State politics. I give you the 'Interests of Literature,' and I have the honor to connect the toast with the name of one of that distinguished trio, the Right Honorable William Ewart Gladstone." Another address by Mr. Gladstone is printed in Volume X. MR. CHAIRMAN, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:-I think no question can be raised as to the just claims of literature to stand upon the list of toasts at the Royal Academy, and the sentiment is one to which, upon any one of the numerous occasions of my attendance at your hospitable board, I have always listened with the greatest satisfaction until the present day arrived, when I am bound to say that that satisfaction is extremely qualified by the arrangement less felicitous, I think, than any which preceded it that refers to me the duty of returning thanks for literature. [Cheers and laughter.] However, obedience is the principle upon which we must proceed, and I have at least the qualification for discharging the duty you have been pleased to place in my hand— that no one has a deeper or more profound sense of the active and constant cultivation of letters as an essential condition of real progress and of the happiness of mankind [cheers], and here every one at once perceives that that sisterhood of which the poet spoke, whom you have quoted, is a real sisterhood, for literature and art are alike the votaries of beauty. Of these votaries I may thankfully say that as regards art I trace around me no signs of decay, and none in that estimation in which the Academy is held, unless, to be sure, in the circumstance of your poverty of choice of one to reply to this toast. [Cheers.] During the present century the artists of this country have gallantly and nobly endeavored to maintain and to elevate their standard [cheers], and have not perhaps in that great task always received that assistance which could be desired from the public taste which prevails around them. But no one can examine even superficially the works which adorn these walls without perceiving that British art retains all its fertility of invention [cheers], and this year, as much as in any year that I can remember, exhibits in the department of landscape, that |